Search results for "singing"
showing 10 items of 72 documents
Music perception and cognition: development, neural basis, and rehabilitative use of music.
2013
Music is a highly versatile form of art and communication that has been an essential part of human society since its early days. Neuroimaging studies indicate that music is a powerful stimulus also for the human brain, engaging not just the auditory cortex but also a vast, bilateral network of temporal, frontal, parietal, cerebellar, and limbic brain areas that govern auditory perception, syntactic and semantic processing, attention and memory, emotion and mood control, and motor skills. Studies of amusia, a severe form of musical impairment, highlight the right temporal and frontal cortices as the core neural substrates for adequate perception and production of music. Many of the basic aud…
Do informal musical activities shape auditory skill development in preschool-age children?
2013
The influence of formal musical training on auditory cognition has been well established. For the majority of children, however, musical experience does not primarily consist of adult-guided training on a musical instrument. Instead, young children mostly engage in everyday musical activities such as singing and musical play. Here, we review recent electrophysiological and behavioral studies carried out in our laboratory and elsewhere which have begun to map how developing auditory skills are shaped by such informal musical activities both at home and in playschool-type settings. Although more research is still needed, the evidence emerging from these studies suggests that, in addition to f…
Embodied Experience and Communicative Intentions of the Singing Performer
2009
Theories of Embodied Cognition assert that simulation mechanisms underlie inter-subjective communication. On this basis we posit that by solely assessing only visual component of a performance, a naïve audience could make similar judgments to those ones elicited by audiovisual or aural perception. Five vocal performances by performers of different levels of expertise were assessed using various of perception (audiovisual, visual and aural perception) by 90 musically uneducated subjects randomly assigned to a specific modality. Subject’s task consisted of pronounce an aesthetical judgment of the performances using an 11-point scale. Results assessed by ANOVA test of repeated measures showed …
What do Singers Say About the Effects of Choral Singing on Physical Health? - Findings from a Survey of Choristers in Australia, England and Germany
2009
This paper presents evidence on choral singers’ perceptions of the physical health benefits of choral singing. It is based on a thematic analysis of answers given to a single open question included in a questionnaire survey of over 1,000 choral singers in Australia, England and Germany: ‘What effects, if any, does singing in a choir have on your physical health?’ The question was carefully worded to be as open as possible, to allow respondents to say that singing has no effects or to identify both positive and negative effects on health. Four findings stand out from this study. Firstly, many respondents did not answer this question or expressed a belief that singing does not have effects on…
National days between commemoration and celebration: remembering 1947 and 1960 in Madagascar
2013
Today Madagascar officially celebrates two national holidays. 29 March is dedicated to the memory of anticolonial resistance in 1947, the commemoration of the dead and the decoration of surviving combatants. 26 June in contrast is celebrated as Madagascar's return to independence in 1960 with parades, cultural performances, singing and dancing. But consecutive governments have altered state politics of commemoration and non-state actors have influenced the way in which 1947 and 1960 are remembered.This study of national days in Madagascar offers an interpretation of the different ways the two key events of national history have been remembered within the fifty years since Independence. Look…
The White Woman’s Haunted Body in Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing
2012
Underpinned by an interpretative grid where the analytic categories of gender and race are interwoven, the paper contends that Doris Lessing’s first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), unveils and dismantles culturally-constructed inscriptions of the white female body as elaborated within the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British colonial discourses and largely reproduced at folk level. Exploring Lessing’s robust delineation of the entanglements of gendered sexuality and race-biased social constraints as active in the colonial context, the paper also suggests that the novel problematizes and recasts traditional British identity configurations from an authorial perspective which po…
SINGING THE SELF: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN SINGER AND COMPOSER JOHANNES VON SOEST
2010
The German singer, composer and writer Johannes von Soest (1448–1506), also referred to as Steinwart or Steinwert, is the author of a vernacular autobiography in verse. One of the very few such documents written by a musician, it gives a highly personal insight into his career, which extended from his training as a chorister in Soest to the ducal chapel in Cleves and afterwards to Bruges (in the company of two unnamed English musicians), Aardenburg (Overijssel), Maastricht, possibly Cologne, Kassel and finally Heidelberg, where he was appointed as Kapellmeister. He subsequently decided to become a physician. The article includes a complete transcription of the text, whose original was destr…
Quality of life (QOL) of older adult community choral singers in Finland.
2013
ABSTRACTBackground: Enhancing quality of life (QOL) of older adults is an international area of focus. Identifying factors and experiences that contribute to QOL of older adults helps promote optimal levels of functioning. This study examines the relationship between perceived benefits associated with choral singing and QOL among community-dwelling older adults.Methods: One hundred seventeen older adults who sing in community choirs in Jyväskylä, Finland, completed self-report measures of QOL (WHOQOL-Bref), depressive symptoms, and a questionnaire about the benefits of singing in choir. Correlational analyses and linear regression models were used to examine the association between the bene…
Comparison of well-being of older adult choir singers and the general population in Finland: A case-control study
2016
Previous research suggests that singing in a choir as an older adult is associated with better quality of life (QOL). However, the degree to which sociodemographic variables and level of engagement in hobbies contribute to this relationship is largely unknown. The aim of the study was to compare quality of life (QOL) of older adult choir singers with a matched sample of older adults from the general population in Finland, taking into consideration sociodemographic variables, satisfaction with health, and level of engagement in hobbies. Case-control methods were used to match a sample of 109 older adult singers with a sample of 307 older adults from the general population. Tobit regression …
The Craft of (Re-)Presenting Musical Works
2021
In this chapter, I explore the encounters between music and participants in learning environments. The encounters I refer to are situations when a teacher or instructor presents music intending to involve participants in responsive activities. The activities can be dialogues about music and meaning, creative music-making or construction of performances, the writing of poems or narratives inspired by the music, creating dances based on the music or singing or playing a selected repertoire. The discussion is primarily related to music listening as a curriculum element in schools and higher music teacher education, and the chapter seeks to analyse strategies and competencies which may be defin…